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When Jim Angelopoulos opened his first restaurant 10 years ago, he hired a lawyer to help him
incorporate. When he later decided to trademark the name with an eye toward expansion, he used a
different route: a website called LegalForce.

“The cost itself is night and day,” said Angelopoulos, who owns Scrambl’z Diner in San Jose,
Calif.

Angelopoulos said LegalForce helped him register his trademark nationally and block another
restaurant from using a similar moniker. “I thought registering a name was only for large
companies,” he said, “but they make it really smooth” for the little guy.

Indeed, a host of other startups with names such as LegalZoom, LegalMatch and LegalReach have
set up shop to help John Q. find a lawyer, prepare legal documents online and even get questions
answered free.

“Main Street can’t afford the law today,” said Charley Moore, founder and chairman of San
Francisco-based Rocket Lawyer.

Moore, who calls himself a “recovering high-priced lawyer,” began his career with Menlo Park,
Calif.-based Venture Law Group, where he recalls meetings with Yahoo’s Inc. founding team.

But he found himself inspired by another VLG client, FindLaw, which helps law firms market
themselves on the Web and gives consumers online legal information. So in 2008, Moore founded
Rocket Lawyer. Backed by Google Ventures and others, it lets users download legal forms and run
questions by pre-screened attorneys for $39 a month.

Camilla Fonseca of San Leandro, Calif., used Rocket Lawyer to help her parents prepare their
wills. “Lawyers are not really in our price range,” she said. “I just typed in
will, and it popped up all these categories. It starts prompting you through questions, so
you can fill out the right form.”

The San Francisco Bay Area has a long track record of demystifying the legal process; Nolo Press
of Berkeley, Calif., began publishing books such as
How to Do Your Own Divorce in the 1970s.

“We decided to change how people access law,” said LegalForce CEO Raj Abhyanker, and he could
easily be speaking for Silicon Valley as a whole.

Abhyanker’s career certainly embodies Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial ethos: A Hewlett-Packard
Co. engineer, he later earned his law degree and practiced patent law at several large firms. In
2009, he built a search engine to let trademark-seekers cull government data, “instead of having to
go to a lawyer and have them do a search.”

Abhyanker says his users filed 15,000 trademark applications around the world last year, “more
than any law firm in history.”

One legal veteran, though, warns that while the online trend has promise, people shouldn’t rely
on DIY for complex matters.

“If it’s not simple,” said Rich Scudellari, who runs the East Palo Alto, Calif., office of law
giant DLA Piper, “it can’t come out of a can.”

Hoping to ward off criticism that LegalForce and its competitors are, in Abhyanker’s words, “
faceless” — or that they encourage the practice of law without a license — last year he opened a
retail operation in downtown Palo Alto. It includes self-help legal books and staff attorneys who
can dole out free advice or references to a specialist.

Still, not everyone is happy with LegalForce’s service: Some posters to online review sites
gripe that the startup is guilty of overly aggressive marketing. In response, Abhyanker has
publicly acknowledged he’s “not the best leader of an organization of our scale” and pledged to
bring in professional managers.

Rocket Lawyer, meanwhile, has been engaged in a nasty legal snit with LegalZoom, the southern
California site launched in 2001 by O.J. Simpson attorney Robert Shapiro. The company has accused
Moore’s outfit of trademark infringement and false advertising.

In October, a federal judge denied LegalZoom’s motion for summary judgment, meaning the case
will likely go to a jury this year.

LegalZoom this month dropped plans for an initial public offering of stock, which had been on
hold since Facebook’s 2012 pratfall chilled the IPO market. LegalZoom, whose investors include
venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, instead will sell a controlling stake
of itself to a European private equity firm for $200 million.